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Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

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Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#81

Post by tomkarlo »

phillmv wrote: post #76
sliverstorm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this logic, as soon as you saturate the market, you are dying?

Yes. You need to find/create more markets. Look at Apple. iPod -> iPhone -> iPad. If I invest 100 dollars in you, I want to receive a percentage back after a certain while. You need to be able to give me 103 dollars back the next year just to beat inflation, i.e. for this to not have been a complete waste of my time. In real terms, this means you need to grow your business by at least 3% in order to give me that retu…

You're right in that most businesses need to grow to increase their value (generally because growth is built into their current valuation) but the narrative you're using isn't on target.

It's entirely possible for a business to give investors good returns even if their business or market isn't growing. Profitability and cash returns from a business can grow as revenues decline if the company either increases operating efficiency, or reduces in investment in recognition of the declining opportunity. MBAs would call this a "cash cow" business - one that should be milked.

We dont tend to see this much in tech because growth is such a fundamental part of our valuations that no company is willing to admit it's in such a position. And you'd probably lose all your engineers over time. But when you look at say, Microsoft, and strip away their non-performing businesses, that's what it looks like: a company that has some assets that produce a lot of profits, but aren't really growing any more, yet if managed properly can continue to throw off gobs of cash for years to come.

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#82

Post by dextorious »

phillmv wrote: post #76
sliverstorm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this logic, as soon as you saturate the market, you are dying?

Yes. You need to find/create more markets. Look at Apple. iPod -> iPhone -> iPad. If I invest 100 dollars in you, I want to receive a percentage back after a certain while. You need to be able to give me 103 dollars back the next year just to beat inflation, i.e. for this to not have been a complete waste of my time. In real terms, this means you need to grow your business by at least 3% in order to give me that retu…

"""Yes. You need to find/create more markets."""

Actually you don't "need" anything. There are tons of examples of profitable companies that do one thing / product, or several things / products and do it for a century or more, with thousands of employees that do not look to expand on other markets. Even more so for companies with less employees.

"""If I invest 100 dollars in you, I want to receive a percentage back after a certain while. You need to be able to give me 103 dollars back the next year just to beat inflation, i.e. for this to not have been a complete waste of my time."""

Yeah, that's why the stock market promotes cancerous growth of companies.

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#83

Post by yuhong »

wwweston wrote: post #75
rplnt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't good/bad. Problem is that IE6 is nonstandard.

I'm not sure there was a browser that did standards better at the time of IE6's initial release. Maybe Opera. And in my opinion, the bigger problem with IE6 was that it was buggy -- both where it purportedly followed standards and where it had its own way of doing things, behavior often didn't match spec or had unexpected side effects. It took devs years of trying to figure out where all the bodies were buried before…

Yea, many people forget that IE6 actually improved standard compliance over IE 5.5.

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#84

Post by nbclark »

Honestly, it is about time that they did this. I worked ont he IE team for a few years, and could never understand (aside from the enterprise argument) why users were not being auto-upgraded. "Hey here's a great new security model to replace the insecure previous version...but no rush on upgrading..."

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#85

Post by kmfrk »

necolas wrote: post #17
mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #11

The article points out that MS will still provide blocking tools for companies. Corporations are the major source of IE6 browsers and I'm not sure this will have any impact on them. The best we can hope for is that high consumer adoption rates will force many more sites to drop IE6 support which might spur companies to finally test and upgrade.

Furthermore, apparently "future versions of IE will provide an option in the product for consumers to opt out of automatic upgrading". Source: http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/12/15/ie-to-...

Sounds reasonable and as something only power users would be aware of.

Updating using Windows Update is the biggest pain in the ass, and it's great to see a much more convenient solution.

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#86

Post by maigret »

phillmv wrote: post #70
ArbitraryLimits wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, what makes you think the "enterprise" market is less lucrative than it used to be?

No growth. Everyone who could possibly use a Windows license has a Windows license and drags their feet about upgrading. You're either busy growing or you're busy dying. As a potential shareholder, I care more about growth than straight up profitability.

"Entreprise" is not limited to Windows. Far, far, far from that. I don't know your background, but in software development (let us exclude plain Website just publishing information), most of it is written for enterprise customers, not private consumers. Excel had around 10 developers years long. I understand cloud is making the difference more blury, but there are just so different needs across different countries, industries, etc - work is in the enterprise. Consumer tools scale, you don't need much people to maintain and develop these.

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#88

Post by phillmv »

tomkarlo wrote: post #81
phillmv wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You need to find/create more markets. Look at Apple. iPod -> iPhone -> iPad. If I invest 100 dollars in you, I want to receive a percentage back after a certain while. You need to be able to give me 103 dollars back the next year just to beat inflation, i.e. for this to not have been a complete waste of my time. In real terms, this means you need to grow your business by at least 3% in order to give me that retu…

You're right in that most businesses need to grow to increase their value (generally because growth is built into their current valuation) but the narrative you're using isn't on target. It's entirely possible for a business to give investors good returns even if their business or market isn't growing. Profitability and cash returns from a business can grow as revenues decline if the company either increases operatin…

Please correct me if I'm wrong!

But:

>Profitability and cash returns from a business can grow as revenues decline if the company either increases operating efficiency, or reduces in investment in recognition of the declining opportunity.

Sure. When I say growth, I mean "make more money this year than you did the year before". This doesn't directly translate into "make more widgets", of course – that's just the (in an ideal world) easiest and least complicated way of achieving that.

>yet if managed properly can continue to throw off gobs of cash for years to come.

Until! It dies ;0.

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#89

Post by phillmv »

dextorious wrote: post #82
phillmv wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You need to find/create more markets. Look at Apple. iPod -> iPhone -> iPad. If I invest 100 dollars in you, I want to receive a percentage back after a certain while. You need to be able to give me 103 dollars back the next year just to beat inflation, i.e. for this to not have been a complete waste of my time. In real terms, this means you need to grow your business by at least 3% in order to give me that retu…

"""Yes. You need to find/create more markets.""" Actually you don't "need" anything. There are tons of examples of profitable companies that do one thing / product, or several things / products and do it for a century or more, with thousands of employees that do not look to expand on other markets. Even more so for companies with less employees. """If I invest 100 dollars in you, I want to receive a percentage back a…

I don't mean to be adversarial, but could you provide examples?

>Yeah, that's why the stock market promotes cancerous growth of companies.

I have troubles with this sometimes. I lie awake at night and think about the little I know about finance and economics and I wonder - is this all a zero sum interaction? Abstractly, the earth is a closed system, right?

Of course, value and money are also abstractions and so aren't directly pegged to any physical constants, so maybe in real terms it doesn't matter either.

Anyhow, my understanding is that the narrative I used above works for stock markets and single shareholder companies.

I have a fixed amount of hours/year to invest in my company/enterprise. Let's suppose it's profitable and yields oh 250k in profit/direct wages to you, the single shareholder.

If your total amount of profit remains constant, you're losing money just via diminished purchasing power. Your employees will demand raises, which means you have to raise prices and/or squeeze more productivity out of your company, yadda yadda yadda. If you don't keep growing… you end up finding yourself in a position where you will begin to contract, and it's easier to go down than to go up.

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#90

Post by matan_a »

dpark wrote: post #50
mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #11

The article points out that MS will still provide blocking tools for companies. Corporations are the major source of IE6 browsers and I'm not sure this will have any impact on them. The best we can hope for is that high consumer adoption rates will force many more sites to drop IE6 support which might spur companies to finally test and upgrade.

The is a common claim, but has anyone actually researched this? Is there any evidence that this is still true? It's my understanding that most of the IE6 market share is in Asia, where many people are running pirated versions of XP.

I've seen first hand that even a large "fortune top 10 places to work" silicon-valley company forces IE6 on their staff. You don't have to look very far.

I did see Chrome installed as well so that might be their solution :)

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